Michael Shaw is an entrepreneur with an unusual background. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London, he recently set up Wellspring Development Capital, a company that helps businesses and organisations in Africa to grow and run more sustainably.
After graduating, Michael, 36, worked in the music industry for twelve years and set up his own music publishing label. During the process of selling it to a bigger company he realized he needed a better understanding of business to be able to effectively communicate with the stakeholders and board of the larger firm. This is why he decided to go back to school and take an MBA at Open University Business School.
In class one day, Michael participated in a seminar where a member of Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO) was giving a presentation about volunteering in Africa. With his partner (now his wife), he decided to go: “We had been working for a long time in the media industry, building and running our business in London, and we wanted to do something different”, he explains, “We didn’t know what to do after VSO. For us it was a way of exploring new things”.
They spent six months with VSO in Malawi, working for the smallholders and the workers of a company operating in the tea sector and accredited to fair trade. And they enjoyed working and living in Africa so much that they decided to stay.
Initially, they decided to invest in new enterprises that had a social impact but were profitable at the same time. However, in the process of exploring where to invest money, they became aware that a lot of businesses were small farmers or quite poorly managed organisations in a position that made it difficult for their company, Wellspring, to invest in them.
“Instead, we decided to help them run their businesses, for example developing their business plans”, Michael explains, “Since then our business has grown far. We’ve been responsive to emerging opportunities as they came up, and we have been broadening our services from private sector clients to development organizations and agencies”.
For Michael, the MBA he earned from Open University has been a crucial ingredient in the success of Wellspring: “I wouldn’t be able to do my job without my MBA. I wouldn’t have had the qualifications to win the contract, and certainly I wouldn’t be in Africa if it wasn’t for OU’s introduction to VSO”, he says, “A good MBA provides you with the models and frameworks that you need to make sense of the problems you deal with everyday, to make plans, to find solutions, to have the confidence to train other managers. This is particularly true if you work in a business that is different from what you’ve been used to”.
Initially set in Malawi, Wellspring is currently managing projects in Botswana, DRC, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.
“Funding for our work comes from our investments and from various sources for the development and business consulting we do,” explains Michael. Funders include USAID, DFID, International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Bank, and government ministries. Clients include the Natural Resource Institute (Greenwich University), GALVmed, Chai Project, Universal Industries, Market Linkages Initiative, ACDI/VOCA, CARANA Corporation and others.
Wellspring brings business expertise to organizations lacking finance or skills, in order to help them grow and create jobs in a sustainable way. “We’re not an NGO and we’re not aid workers: we create sustainable solutions with our business knowledge”, summarizes Michael, “We recruit local managers and staff and build up their capacities”.
With GALVmed, for example, Wellspring is working on how to bring new vaccines to farmers in poor areas. This means solving different types of problems: sometimes, the problem is having the capacity to produce these vaccines in Africa, sometimes its making them affordable to the farmers, and sometimes it’s the distribution chain: “We work with companies that help us commercialize vaccines, providing sustainable commercial solutions.”
In addition, Wellspring is working on the impact of mobile technology in Africa with a project called Esoko, which means “E-market” in Swahili. The challenge is to utilise appropriate mobile phone and SMS technology to develop market information systems and improve efficiency in the value chain in the agriculture, finance and health sectors. For Michael this “is a high-risk new market, but it’s also a new opportunity, so it’s very exciting”.
Esoko networks is a franchise developed out of Ghana. In this case, investment comes from Mark Davies, an internet entrepreneur who is now living and working in Ghana; the IFC; and some Silicon Valley investors.
Michael is passionate about what he is doing: “It’s a very rewarding experience, from which we’ve also managed to make a good living”, he says. He does not know if he will ever come back to Europe: “I’m not a big fan of the ‘where do you see yourself in five years’ kind of question”, he says, “Things never turn out as you’ve expected”.
Wellspring is searching for MBA graduates who want to do something different: “We want to bring in people with good experience and business training, who can come and work with some of our young managers to help them make sense of their job”. Anybody interested out there?
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